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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.
This is the Orbital Operations for
7 JUNE 2020
A letter from Warren Ellis about
SPIDERS AND FINGERS
The temperature has crashed here, after several days of early summer. I'm writing this on Friday and I've actually had to put one of the heaters on, as it's due to drop past 5 C tonight.
Today was the day stuff blew up in comics: DC Comics pulled out of Diamond Distributors to use their own distribution services. Which seems to have a lot of people confused, and I do not have any inside information at all, but It occurs to me that if you tell a subsidiary of Warner Brothers that you're only going to pay 25% of what you owe them for several months, then that subsidiary of Warner Brothers may have opinions about that.
Also it is the 200th least important thing that happened today. You all know what's going on out there. Be conscious of it, be of help if you can, and, I've heard, stay off the hashtags unless you're involved in organisation and support, because, as I've told you many many times, it's a loud world now and the churn is high. Listen and learn. Be mindful. Even out here on the Thames Delta, where some of us think this is all happening a very long way away -- it never really is. And stay safe.
You already know all this. This is why this newsletter is always about everything else. But in case anyone actually for some reason needs to see me say it: fuck racism, defund militarised police, and, while we're at it, fuck transphobes too.
(I am not on social media. This newsletter and LTD are it for me.)
Please allow me to amuse you now with a selection of the most ridiculous food platings I have ever seen. You have to get to #6 before it starts getting odd, and from then it gets crazy.
Screenshots Of Despair always has what you need:
I am currently on the 10th and last Martin Beck book, THE TERRORISTS. Co-author Per Wahlöö died during the writing of the book, and it was completed by Maj Sjöwal. (They usually alternated chapters.)
Gunvald Larsson got to his feet, found himself not seriously hurt and looked about to see what it was that had knocked him down. The object lay at his feet. It had a bull neck and a puffy face, and strangely enough, the black enamel steel-framed glasses were still on. The security expert scrambled to his feet, clearly unhurt, even if some of his elegance had been dissipated. He stared incredulously at the head and crossed himself. Gunvald Larsson looked down at his suit. It was ruined. ‘Goddammit,’ he said. Then he looked at the head lying at his feet. ‘Maybe I ought to take it home,’ he said to himself. ‘As a souvenir.’
As all Beck books, it has its moments of acid humour and its passages of grimness. This one has a big melancholy streak through it. But also:
Twenty minutes later he had fallen asleep with his cheek against her shoulder. Her shoulder soon grew numb, and then her arm. She didn't move, but just lay awake in the dark, liking him.
Books in the queue include:
Creeping Jenny, Jeff Noon
Strange Hotel, Eimear McBride
The Other Name: Septology I-II, Jon Fosse
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
Verge: Stories, Lidia Yuknavitch
All of which I am faintly dreading because they will make me feel like an incompetent. The Beck stories, like the Maigret stories, don't have that effect on me so much, because they are oddly (given their nature) warm and inviting works that lead me either to immerse or (via their excellent translators) explore the ways in which they operate. Jeff Noon and Lidia Yuknavitch, on the other hand, through no fault of their own, make me feel like a pre-human mammal of the grasslands with a vocabulary of four different kinds of grunt.
Roger Strunk's Time Bunker
Roger Strunk is a designer, artist and design historian with a special interest in versions of the future. He has a vast collection of strange design objects from all over the world, and has showcased his finds on IG and elsewhere for years. But he has so much stuff that it's hard to give it all space. So now Roger has landed his Time Bunker here with us. Let's look through The Terrifying Round Cosmic Void Window to see what he's found this week.
Roger says:
What we’re looking at here is the cover of a program for the 1962 Space Fair, an annual public event put on by the US Navy’s Pacific Missile Range at Point Mugu, California, where visitors could see static displays and flight demonstrations of air and space technology. The program contains a schedule of events, info on the Navy’s missile and space efforts, and advertising from industry sponsors. Beginning in 1960, this would be the third annual Space Fair, and I’ve found some other items from as late as 1968. After 1974, the name was changed to the Point Mugu Air Show.
The cover art, which features a painting that draws parallels between the armored warriors of the past and the modern astronaut of the 1960s, was created by Don Fay — an accomplished artist, illustrator and art director. At the time, Fay worked as a commercial artist for the Department of Defense at the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, California. He’s since retired, but based on what I could find online, it looks like he now devotes himself to painting and teaching.
I spent this week on PROJECT GENEVA, which consists of five modules and an overview document. I am, at this point (Saturday), about a module-and-a-half short, and I expect to land that half-module on Sunday while you are all "resting" and "having fun" and "being happy" and other things I know nothing about. The last module will have to wait, because I'm on BATMAN'S GRAVE for the whole of this coming week, bringing that series in for a landing.
But, once GENEVA's all locked, that generates me a few months' work, which is enough runway for me to look around and decide what's next. I seem to be done with original comics for the moment. Either the opportunities aren't there, or the deals aren't the kind I choose to work under, or things are just too complex for my stupid injured brain to handle. (Show me a spreadsheet or a complex document and I will show you presentation of vertigo, slurring and stress for thirty minutes. I can't read mirror writing any more, either, weirdly. Of all the things to lose! It's like a ghost reached into my head with a pointy finger and said "we're going to scratch out this bit just so you know we were here and we can come back any time we like")
So I don't know what's next, exactly. That's okay. 2020 has been... fluid for everyone.
It is now Sunday morning. I've just gotten the latest draft of a story document out the door, and the other outline rewrite in front of me is going to have to become a side gig for the week because it requires a lot more surgery than I thought. Like, a lot.
You have to understand that, in this job, miscommunications and misunderstandings and evolving positions can often happen, and it's nobody's fault. Anything involving people and creativity and commerce gets messy, right? In this instance, I thought I was designing a room, but it turns out I need to design the whole manor house.
(Correction: that's the other other outline rewrite I have, there's another one in front of me. This is why I have whiteboards. God, Warren.)
And now, the news.
THE NEWS, with Lordess Foudre
created for Orbital Operations by Lordess Foudre
Lordess Foudre Instagram - Lordess Foudre print shop
I saw my old colleague Chris Cooper in the news -- some crazy racist woman tried to have him killed by cops in Central Part. I knew Chris when we were both at Marvel. He was a lovely guy, and I enjoyed his company immensely. We definitely got slightly drunk together at a Marvel summit out in Glen Cove. I always liked him a lot. He did one of the funniest things I ever saw at my time at Marvel. Back then, Marvel would release a summer book called the Marvel Swimsuit Issue, which was exactly as awful as you think it is. What they used to call "fan service" and "good girl art."
Except one year Chris Cooper somehow got hold of it. And that year's issue was the gayest thing you ever saw. Like, gaydar installations all over the Northern Hemisphere just straight up burst into flames. Anyone who beheld that book from a distance of twenty feet became, by genetic testing, 3% gayer. It was so fucking funny, it was so not what Marvel did at the time, and it was so well played.
Chris, wherever you are, I hope life is becoming more peaceful.
Additional to the Diamond thing about, from this article, a quote from previous DC President Diane Nelson:
I can say purely as a private individual that Diamond has, for a long time, been unwilling or unable to modernize and support and grow the biz as needed for a healthy direct channel. And may not even be solvent.
That's quite a thing, isn't it?
As you're aware, I work at DC Comics currently -- and hope to for the foreseeable future. How DC attend to their distribution business does not affect me at all. It may even lead to space for experimentation, which is something the American commercial field could sorely use.
Madeline Ashby just pointed me at this essay by herself, Scott Smith and Susan Cox-Smith, for this reason:
With the echoic nature of the tools we use — primarily open-source social media, news, and research resources — the world right now is indeed a dark place to go to work. To quote writer Warren Ellis’s 2016 novella NORMAL, a too-close-to-home story about a futurist who is checked into a detox center due to a cognitive breakdown:
“Some people call it ‘abyss gaze’. Gaze into the abyss all day and the abyss will gaze into you.”
So, when almost all the information in the universe is available to you, and practically breathing down your neck, how in the world do you deal with the relentless exposure — much less sort and analyze what you’ve been exposed to? Even if you aren’t a future-watcher, and are just trying to keep up with fast-moving life-or-death data while still trying to do your day job, or protect your family, how do you hang on and not risk going dark when one moment can change everything?
I would say it's nice that "abyss gaze" is still being quoted, but... well, you don't actually want anyone to get abyss gaze, do you?
God, I'm rambly today. I'll shut up in just a minute.
Big year for people I know getting Eisner Award nominations! So please be upstanding for: Colleen Doran, Ed Brubaker, Christopher Sebela, Chip Zdarsky, Si Spurrier, Jeff Lemire, Simon Gane, Brian Bendis, Christian Ward, Kieron Gillen, Steve Pugh, Francesco Francavilla, Matt Hollingsworth and Rian Hughes! Congrats, all.
(The actual full list is not as male as that? And probably not as white? I'm just congratulating the people on the list I've known personally. Please save your emails of outrage for when I invade Mars)
If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/creator/ Executive Producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix.
Please add
warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com
to your address book so I don't keep getting marked as sp7m just for sending you an email with four fucking links in it.
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I post during the week at LTD.
SPEKTRMODULE
Recent purchases include:
And this, which I heard a track off of on BBC Radio 3 and was immediately captivated by and Shazamed and located on Bandcamp! Because sometimes internet devices work just as you want them to in 2020! (Sometimes. Rarely. Almost never really. But this time!)
Well, it's been a week, right? And there's no reason to expect that next week will be any more fun. So that's the baseline. If next week is as bad or worse than this week, then you can say, "well, I was ready for that, this is all as expected." And if it is, in any quantum, better than this week? Then that's a bonus and you can be delighted. Take the small wins. Take a breath, roll your shoulders, unclench your jaw, loosen your toes. Every day's a new start. Hold on tight. See you in a week.
- W
